Elon Musk Backs a Brain-Computer Interface Venture: Neuralink

Elon Musk is the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX. He is known as the CEO of companies which are just at the beginning of their existence with no public market at all. Elon Musk is known for his futuristic planning and investing in products of the future. Tesla works on making autonomous and electric cars practical, while SpaceX is an aerospace manufacturing company that also provides space transport services. Both of these companies are unknown to the mainstream public since it is not directly related to them and is too far-fetched. Keeping up to his name, Elon Musk announced the launch of “Neuralink” which is a brain-computer interface (BCI) venture aiming to create devices that can be implanted in the human brain.

The eventual purpose of this venture is to help humans merge with software and keep pace with the immense advancements in Artificial Intelligence.

Elon Musk Backs a Brain-Computer Interface Venture: Neuralink

Elon Musk has been hinting his interest in the project for a long time. Recently, while addressing a crowd in Dubai he said,

Over time I think we will probably see a closer merger of biological intelligence and digital intelligence. It’s mostly about the bandwidth, the speed of the connection between your brain and the digital version of yourself, particularly output.

After his interest in this venture, his fans also enquired his progress over “neural lace”. Neural Lace is a sci-fi term for a brain-computer interface which is used to improve human intelligence. One of Elon Musk’s followers asked,

What about neural lace? Announcement soon?

Elon Musk replied,

Maybe next month.

Putting an electric chip into a human brain is not a new idea, however, the concept stayed in fiction. This is because it is extremely dangerous to insert a foreign particle in human brain after a complicated operation. Besides, no one is ready to get a chip inside their brain, for now at least. Blake Richards, a neuroscientist said,

People are only going to be amenable to the idea [of an implant] if they have a very serious medical condition they might get help with.